People come to Valley Hope in Atchison, Kansas, to get help. They’re fed up with addiction to cocaine or methamphetamine or OxyContin.
And that’s when some find out through a drug test that they’re actually hooked on something else, too: A drug they didn’t even know they were taking.
Fentanyl.
This synthetic opioid is far more potent than morphine or heroin. Even small amounts can kill. Withdrawal from it is painful.
And the growing practice of spiking other drugs with fentanyl — to heighten the addiction and keep buyers coming back for more — is fueling a sharp increase in fatal overdoses across Kansas and the U.S.
Physician Jon Siebert, Valley Hope Association’s medical director, sees the shock that patients experience when they learn they’re addicted to fentanyl. He asks them what they’ve been buying.
“The typical answer is, they’ll say, ‘Well, I’m doing Oxy-30,’” he said. “People who are manufacturing fentanyl, they press it into a pill.”
The pills look like 30mg OxyContin. It’s enough to trick people into trying it. Some eventually realize it contains fentanyl, but by then stopping is no easy feat.
The latest preliminary federal and state tallies of drug deaths paint an alarming picture for 2020 that appears to be worsening in 2021.
Overdose deaths increased 30% across the country in 2020, and rose by one-quarter in Kansas and by one-fifth in Missouri.https://datawrapper.dwcdn.net/cEAsu/4/
The federal government says the national death toll — it topped 90,000 in 2020 — set a grim record. In Kansas, it appears nearly 500 people died from overdoses.
Figures aren’t complete for 2021, but the most recent tallies published by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention suggest fatal overdoses continue to trend upward.
Experts say the alarming trend is fueled largely by the prevalence of fentanyl and similar substances that people often consume unknowingly when mixed into other opioids and drugs.
National health officials suspect a direct link to the spread of COVID-19, which isolated people, destabilized their finances and housing, and complicated their access to medical and mental health care.
Siebert agrees.
